The Assessment of Sustainability Indicators in the Villagers’ Lives in Iran with Emphasis on Natural Hazards: A Case Study

Abstract

Natural hazards such as earthquakes take place around the world and when combined with human create natural disasters. Earthquake, as one of natural hazards, in recent years has caused the damage and the destruction of many rural areas with major losses in rural areas for the lack of sustainability in political, economic, social, physical and operational criteria. Thus, to overcome the damage caused by earthquakes in rural areas, the assessment of sustainability status seems necessary to plan and strengthen according to desirability of the status of sustainability indicators. This is a descriptive-analytical study; and data collection was conducted through field methods and questionnaires. To test the hypothesis, T statistical methods, correlation method and F-test were performed using SPSS software. The results of the study showed that villages were at a low and undesirable level under all aspects, except social index in terms of sustainability. Comparisons showed that there was a significant mean difference among villages in terms of sustainability. Also, the research concerns ranking of villages in terms of sustainability against earthquake hazard using multi-criteria decision methods. Finally, in order to improve sustainability indicators at the level of villages, some strategies were presented.